The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived

Comic science fiction from the author of 'The greatest show off earth'.

This is a story that had to be told, a book that had to be written. For it is the description of a man’s life lived simply, without glory, uncomplicated, and based solely on the principles of love for family, honesty, and knowing right from wrong. It is the story of my father’s life, beginning with his death, and then looking back on what were the most extraordinary and cherished childhood memories of living with him. My father was a strong, fun-loving man with a great sense of humour and fun. He was born in a time of great depression in Northwest England in the late 1920s. His father worked dockside in the port of Liverpool, pulling horses and traps that transported coal and food stuff all over the county of Lancashire, and was similarly a man who enjoyed life and watching their beloved Liverpool FC playing at Anfield on Saturday afternoons. My dad only ever loved one woman, Marjorie, a Scouse lass of strong Irish heritage. Together they rode the highs and lows of marriage for nearly sixty years. Four children, eleven grandchildren, and six great grandchildren are the testament to a marriage that he and she made work. The lessons he taught me as a boy have helped me to become the man I am today. The guidance he gave me as a teenager enabled me to become the father I have become. And for all this, I thank the Most Extraordinary Ordinary Man who ever lived, and hereby present My Dad’s Story.

Hun, the universal appellation for terror, was earned with brutality and blood. Legend has it that Mahira, a Hun dynasty King of the early 6th century, was the most cruel man of all time. Sagala, the capital of his vast but dying empire, that extended from the Central Steppes, over the Hindu Kush, into what is modern-day Pakistan and north-western India, to the borders of the Gupta Empire, was a place where unrivalled beauty and extreme bestiality existed in uneasy alliance. Like his predecessors, Mahira too, had visions that made him both feared as well as invincible. Obsessed with the desire to rule the world, he set off into the grasslands of Central Asia, on a journey to unite every kingdom known to man, under his savage rule. But the Gods scoffed at his hubris and visited him with nightmarish visions and excruciating pain. A prisoner of intense suffering, Mahira grew ever more erratic, ever more brutal. His heinous murder of the King of Lanka, lives on in folklore to this day. On taking the kingdom of Kashmir, he ordered the massacre of the entire Buddhist population. On a whim, he slaughtered a hundred of his own elephants. But, as this victim of malady escapes execution, hatred, betrayal, conflict and war, all he truly desires is the love of his Queen. Centuries have passed since King Mahira lived and ruled, but his infamy and deeds live on in legend and folklore. And echoes of his aggression, quest for power, world domination and subjugation of people, resound 1400 years later, with dangerous portent, in a world given increasingly to violence and terror.